


Uncounted

by aderyn



Series: Natural Facts [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Gen, stumbling blocks, what we think we don't say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-26
Updated: 2012-03-26
Packaged: 2017-11-02 13:05:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He’s never used a term of endearment on anyone, other than “dear” itself..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uncounted

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second round of the game that[ Lavellington](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavellington/pseuds/Lavellington) and I concocted: write dual 221B’s based on a poem, or a piece of one. Lavellington picked out the Amy Lowell gem below, and it made me go sweet-ish and literal rather than abstract and angsty. Thank you kindly, L.; I needed that.
> 
> The Bungler, by Amy Lowell
> 
> You glow in my heart  
> Like the flames of uncounted candles  
> But when I go to warm my hands,  
> My clumsiness overturns the light,  
> And then I stumble  
> Against the tables and chairs.

 

 

He’s never used a term of endearment on anyone, other than “dear” itself, which he uses on Mycroft when he’s done something rash (roll right onto a military base) or is being ingratiating (my windows just imploded) or (more likely) sarcastic.  And no-one has ever used a term of endearment on him (discounting that waitress at the coffee shop who called him “darling” and told him not to be stingy with his sugar while John rolled his eyes), that he can remember, not even his own mother.

***

Well, that’s not quite true, is it.  Mrs. Hudson calls him “dear”; she calls him “love”; once she even called him son (he thinks), when he’d stumbled upstairs, coughing, grimed (lime, iron oxide and river silt), hair scrambled into rusty peaks.

He knocked over a lamp and a pile of books on retro realist criminology, and Mrs. Hudson came to see he was alright, that the oxides weren’t really blood, that the cough wasn’t really pneumonia; never mind the carpets for tonight, son.  “Go to sleep,” she might have said.

***

He needs a case. He needs a fix. He can’t upend the flat thoroughly enough.

“Sherlock,” John says.

“John,” he says back.

Proper names are not endearments. Proper names are not balms.

He’s never used a term of endearment on anyone--or just barely.

 


End file.
